Elizabeth Taylor: Before tape begins While we're waiting for Phil Caputo, I'd like to just mention this tape begins afternoon where we heard each of there writers read, and I think everyone was bowled over by the variety of voices and the variety of points of view that we heard representing writing Vietnam, and after yesterday's afternoon with veterans talking to each other, led by Frank Grzyb right here, which was a very intense and powerful sharing of getting from the story to the writing, and then last night with Tim O'Brien here giving an extraordinary President's Lecture on the problematics of truth and then having them read this afternoon-this has been a week, that, for many of us, we're going to remember for a long time. Here's Phil, and we'll get going. You're late for class again, Phil.
Philip Caputo: Yeah. The story of my life.
Beth Taylor: That's his line! Pointing to Tim O'Brien So, good evening, my name is Beth Taylor, I teach advanced writing courses in the English Department here at Brown. It's wonderful to see you all here, and to welcome this extraordinary gathering of writers. Very simply, this came about as I was trying to write the stories of the young men I lost to the Vietnam War: my friend Butch to battle with the seventh Marines, my cousin Rick in a plane crash during Quaker service at Quang Nai hospital, my friend Bob to physical torture in the Washington DC jail after a White House protest, my friend Tony, who did cross the Rainy River, to emigrate to Canada, and my brother Geoff, to suicide, when he got trapped between pacifism and militarism. I have talked a little bit about my boys in a new book called "Friends and the Vietnam War," but as I was working on the longer book, and I was poring over the letters, journals and poems of my boys, as well as the interviews I had done with family and friends, I was having a tough time bringing my boys to life again in words.
So one morning, last year, I woke up, writing in my head, and I saw, right there in my room, Tim, Laura, Phil, my poets, and Jade, my favorite writers of Vietnam, all there in the room with me, saying, "OK, we're here to help." So I thought, if I needed this, then others must, too. And Brown being the just-do-it community that it is, within days, colleagues were saying, "Make it happen." So I would like to thank the Charles K. Colver Lectureship Fund, the Brown University Faculty Lectureship Fund, the Presidents Lecture Series, the Department of English, the Watson Institute for International Studies, the Creative Writing Program, the Dean of the College, the Chaplain's Office, and generous friends of the Brown English department, for making this happen. And in particular I would like to thank Gale Nelson, who helps run the Creative Writing Program, and Marilyn Netter, who is, where are you, Marilyn-- right in front of me, of course, who holds up the English Department, for their unflagging help with all the details of organizing over the last year. I would also like to thank the students of my course called "Writing Vietnam." They have walked with me into the writing of these writers, and they created their own very moving fiction, memoir, poems and biography, sometimes based on the experiences of their own veteran fathers or Vietnamese mothers.
Now I would like to introduce you to our writers. Most of them have written in several genres and been awarded our nation's top literary prizes. Phil Caputo, the author of "Rumor of War," the first memoir from the war that took us so hauntingly and troublingly there and back, and showed us that these stories would only work if we were deeply honest. Tim O'Brien, the author of "The Things They Carried," the first fiction of the war read by everybody: vets, academics, women, high school English classes; whose stories of why truth is not fact and how a war story is more often a story about love and sunlight made us all see everything we remembered in a new way, a truer way. Yusef Komunyakaa, our Pulitzer-winning poet, and author of "Dien Cai Dau," who brought the sensitivities of race and jazz into his poems of sorrow and witness in the war, Marilyn McMahon, the Navy nurse who turned to poetry, in anthologies like "The Vietnam War in American Stories, Songs and Poems," and "Visions of War, Dreams of Peace," to finally give voice and image to the young men she tried to help, and of that time of faith, duty and horror that forever changed the woman she thought she was going to be. Laura Palmer, who covered the war for radio and magazines, and who created the elegantly elegiac book, "Shrapnel in the Heart," the stories of soldiers on the wall, and the journeys of their families after losing their son, cousin, brother, friend. And Jade Ngoc Quang Hyunh, whose memoir "South Wind Changing," tells the story of his family, torn apart by the war, his surviving the brutality of reeducation camp, his repeated attempts to escape Vietnam, and his struggle to settle in the US. He earned his BA at Bennington College and his MFA here at Brown. We welcome him here, back, with great pleasure.
I have asked each writer, beginning with Phil, to talk fifteen minutes about their experience in the war, the ways they have written about it, what they have learned as they have tried different genres, and the legacy of the Vietnam War in their lives and writing now. After that, at Tim O'Brien's suggestion, they are each going to ask a question of one of their colleagues here. And then we'll open the floor for questions at those microphones there. So Phil, take it away.
Philip Caputo: Um, when I-I went to Vietnam neither as a draftee nor as a volunteer-I had actually gone into the Marine Corps in nineteen sixty-four, before there was a formal US presence of ground troops in Vietnam. I happened to be stationed with the Third Marine Division in Okinawa, Japan, and on March seventh of nineteen sixty-five, which is getting to be a hell of a lot longer ago than I like to think about, that particular battalion that I was with was sent south, to Da Nang, to, just, provide security for the Da Nang airfield from which airstrikes were being conducted against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese-not that I'm drawing a parallel here, but it was a situation not dissimilar from what's happening right now to the displacement of that helicopter squadron over Kosovo, and there's a unit of Eighty-second Airborne troops who are being, who are providing security for that helicopter squadron. That's what we thought we were going to do. We were supposed to be there for 30 days, and that particular regiment that I was with did not leave until eight years later. I was a rifle platoon commander, which means I was in command of about thirty to thirty five riflemen-that was my main job; I did that for about eight of the sixteen months I was over there, the remainder of the eight months, or I should say the other eight months, I spent in various staff positions with an infantry battalion and an infantry regiment. That, you know, in a very factual way, kind of describes what I did over there: I left in July of nineteen sixty-six.
Um, fifteen guys that I knew, not all of them were in my platoon, but they were people I knew intimately enough to have, you know, shared secrets and drinks and so for the like that, have their names on the wall in, in Washington. So at about the age of twenty-two I became very intimately acquainted with death and with sudden death, and because of that, as has been true, I suppose, since Thermopylae and probably before then, the war became the most profound experience of my life, and remains so. I felt, when I got back from Vietnam, for reasons that I can't explain and never will be able to explain, that I had something to say about it. And this feeling, which was really a compulsion, seized me entirely, so much so that in nineteen sixty-seven, while I was still in the Marine Corps and stationed as a training officer, in Camp Lejeune North Carolina, I started "A Rumor of War". I was at a very difficult time trying to write it under those circumstances, as you can imagine, and after I was discharged I had this, some kind of goofy notion in my head that if I went over to Europe and escaped, the news about Vietnam and the atmosphere about Vietnam that was in the United States at the time, that I would get some sort of distance on the experience and be able to write about it. I discovered, to my dismay, that it was as much an issue in Europe as it was in the United States, or almost as much, and I really couldn't, couldn't escape it, and I had a very difficult time trying to sort things out and to write about it in a way that satisfied me.
All together, I spent eight years writing "A Rumor of War-" I started it when I was twenty-six years old, and didn't finish it until I was nearly thirty-four and part of the reason I just described, but another reason that I think - there's two reasons-one was I think I was not quite in a psychological or emotional condition to write about the war in the way I wanted to, to get the right distance on it. My misconception was that, in removing myself geographically, I would somehow remove myself psychologically, but that proved to be fallacious. The other reason, that I think perhaps speaks more to the literary problems of Vietnam, for those of you, as a subject of literature, for those of you who might be interested, is that there were really two generations of American soldiers that went to Vietnam, and I was with the first one, but Tim was with the second. Tim and I are separated in age by only five years, but that five years is almost a generational difference. When I went, the very formative experience, both literarily speaking, and I might say that as far as my personal life went, were Korea and World War Two. I kind of thought that I would be participating in a reenactment of those two events, but particularly World War Two. That is to say, that I was going to be a savior, I was going to participate in a noble and grand cause, and discovered that that was not true, and that much of the film and literature that I grew up with as models of writing did not fit the experience that I had had.
Vietnam was a war that had no front lines, no discreet battles, like Normandy or Iwo Jima or Gettysburg, for that matter. It was a war that seemed to take place almost in a kind of vacuum, and I had a hard time trying to figure out how to make a classical narrative out of this. You see, what I wanted to do was make a classical narrative out of it, because that is what I'd been trained to do, that's what I'd learned how to do. I didn't really know how to make a non-classical narrative out of a non-classical war. You might say that my problem, literarily, was not dissimilar from the military problem that, say, General Westmoreland had. He was trying to fight a conventional war-an unconventional war-by conventional means. So, "A Rumor of War" underwent any number of metamorphoses and finally ended up as a memoir, in which I saw that the story that I wanted-the classical beginning, middle, end story, or if you want to call it that, the classical story of the mythic journey, would have been my own story, so that was the story I decided to tell, and that notion came over me in a rather odd place-it came over me in Rome, where I was, then, the Rome correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, and I was practicing my Italian by reading Dante's "Inferno-"not very well, I might add, and-despite my last name-and while I was reading that, it struck me that Dante's journey from light into darkness into a new or truer light was the story I wanted to tell, and that's basically what I did, or tried to do, anyway, in "A Rumor of War." So I started off in the light of delusions, went into a darkness within myself, and then came out with a clearer view of, both of myself, and I think of human nature, I think, perhaps, closer to the truth, even though it may be something of a bleak truth, and that was pretty much the story of how I wrote the book, um, when I finished the book in nineteen seventy-four, seventy-five, my expectations of it were pretty dismal.
At that time, writing about Vietnam literarily, as opposed to, say journalism of Vietnam, was akin to writing about candid sex in 1850. It just simply wasn't done. And no publisher would have wanted to touch it, and as a matter of fact, the agent who I eventually acquired, who's still my agent, showed it around and nobody wanted to touch it, and he finally gave it to a woman named Marion Wood, over at Henry Holt and Company, and she refused to read the manuscript for three weeks. It just sat on her desk. She said, "I'm not going to read anything about this." But she finally read it, and she liked it, and they decided to publish it, and my expectations of the time was that it was going to sell a few thousand copies, and all I wanted to do was to just have said to myself, "I told the story, I did what I wanted to do, and now will go on to something else." And the book, for some reason, because of the timing of it, or some other reason, became something of a hit, if I can use that phrase, and continues to sell rather, rather well. So I guess it hit some sort of nerve or some sort of chord, maybe in having a lot to do with the time it came out-actually, Tim-excuse me, Beth, you said mine was the first memoir; actually, Tim wrote a memoir about Vietnam, "If I Die in a Combat Zone," before I did, but it came out at a time when, I think, people weren't quite ready to hear those voices. And I think that the only reason that mine struck the chord that it did is that people, by nineteen seventy-seven, were more ready to hear those voices.
Since that time, I've written eight other books. Some of them have had to do with Vietnam directly, others indirectly; sometimes, a novel like I wrote called "Horn of Africa" took place in Africa, but it had a oral landscape that was the landscape-moral landscape-of Vietnam. Um, to wrap it up, I have found-um, I have found that having written that book at that time that everything I have done since then has been done in the shadow of it. I'm rather grateful it was big enough to have cast a shadow, but at the same time that thing can be kind of a liability, and you find yourself as a writer, with a lot of other things to say that people don't seem to listen to quite as acutely as they listen to that first work, and it can also get to be something of a burden around your neck, and I have recently finished a novel-it's a sea story that takes place in nineteen-one, which I would hope would show some of the people who read me that I actually can write about something else, and that perhaps the next conference I get invited to will be at the Naval War College or something. So anyway, that's sort of, that's a bit ad lib to ad hoc, but that's the story.
Beth Taylor: Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien: Well, following Phil Caputo is always an adventure. That guy is the most articulate human being on earth, and I'm not going to even try to do what he did. I was drafted in nineteen sixty-eight; as I said last night, I was opposed to the war in Vietnam, it seemed to me an ill-conceived war; an immoral war, and yet went to it anyway, for the reasons I talked about last night, and I won't repeat them, uh, I served as a foot soldier, for much like Phil, in my case for about three quarters of my tour, uh, just walking around the province of Quang Nai, which is the province where the My Lai massacre occurred, which we heard about, oh gosh, halfway through my time in Vietnam. Came home from Vietnam fairly well adjusted, or so it seemed at the time. I remember gliding into Seattle about midnight or so, and looking down and seeing the golden arches of McDonalds below, feeling as tawdry and as glitzy as they are, those arches, feeling an incredible giddiness inside me-I was home, and I was alive, and I was very happy-I signed my name to a little meal ticket that entitled me to a free steak, took the pledge of allegiance, and got on another airplane that took off, still late at night, I suppose, 4 am, something like that, heading for Minnesota, where I'm from, and I remember flying over North Dakota, it was March, there was snow on the ground, and you could see the patterns of the cornfields below, feeling a tenderness and a love for a country that I'd really despised, growing up there.
At some point before landing in Minneapolis, I went to the back of the airplane, and took off my uniform, put on a sweater, and a pair of blue jeans, and, you know, sneakers, and pretty much haven't taken it off since (laughter)-and the hat. I didn't feel, excuse the language, fucked up about Vietnam much; maybe a little now and then, but not much. I felt happy. I went to Harvard to study government-I was going to get a doctorate, and in my off hours when I was through studying for the day, began writing little vignettes about the war-not for reasons of therapy or catharsis, but rather just to get it out of me and into you; the you being, at the time, not very specific, but to transmit reminiscences and memories to some unknown audience. A friend of mine at Harvard, a physics doctoral candidate, read a, I don't know, about eighty pages of this stuff, almost on a whim, and suggested I send it off to a publisher, and on a whim I did. I had always wanted to be a writer but it seemed an improbable pursuit, beyond me. And sent this thing off on a whim, it was taken, published, and it was not until the publication of "If I Die," my first book, not a very well-written book, I might add, but an honest book, that I even began to consider the possibility of being a writer for the rest of my life.
My-I came to writing through a kind of back door, and now it's my life-that is to say, I don't think of myself as a veteran I don't think if Vietnam very much, I think of sentences day and night, for these eight or nine hours a day, how to make a decent sentence, how to make a decent paragraph and story. And for now, what dominates is art; that is, trying to make a well-shaped, well-forged decent book, one that goes beyond merely the topicality of Vietnam. Phil and I were talking after this afternoon's, you know, those readings we gave. Both of us confess to a slightly icky feeling that you get when writing about a subject that almost demands sympathy-you know, Vietnam, therefore you sort of got to like the writing. You know if you're writing about child abuse, you sort of have to like the poem. Even though it may be a really shitty poem, you sort of, you can't say that, because the subject is so important. Um, and that's one of the things that I want to explore later on, when we ask our questions. For me, Vietnam is important, yes. It's an important part of my life, one I'll never forget, but at the same time it's not dominant. What's dominant is for me, trying to make good books.
Beth Taylor: Yusef Komunyakaa
Yusef Komunyakaa: OK, I'm going to be very brief-um, I, was drafted in nineteen sixty-eight, and went to Fort Benning in Georgia. I had this idea that, perhaps, the war would be over within six months, and I kept my fingers crossed, and close to the eleventh week, I began to think about a branch transfer. So I put in for a branch transfer, got into the Infantry OCS and my orders came very quickly for Vietnam, and I went to Vietnam, as an infantry-not as an infantry platoon leader, which I'd been training for, but as a combat correspondent, with the Americal Division in Chu Lai. The first six months in Vietnam, I remember going fairly systematically out to any action that happened within the area of operation, taking a helicopter, going out to the fighting or whatever. But I had very systematically studied some of the culture of the Vietnamese, and I began to think about parallels, because I come from Louisiana, a very vibrant climate. If one sets a rough seed in the soil, automatically life springs forward, and I saw that parallel within the context of the Vietnam landscape as well, and consequently, at least a psychological identity began to form between Vietnam and where I grew up.
Um, when I came back to the United States, I landed at Travis Air Force base, and I didn't want to really think about Vietnam. I wanted to attempt to erase Vietnam from my whole psychological landscape because there were other things happening within the country as well. Um, the Civil Rights movement was definitely in focus, so I couldn't divorce myself form that, either. So within the context of my conscience, I suppose, two things were happening-the war, the residual war, the images of that war in Vietnam, but also what was happening within the context of the United States as well, as far as Civil Rights, especially in Bogalusa, Louisiana. So everything became sort of married to each there in a very strange way. Um, I was introduced to war through imagery. My great-uncle had been in World War One, and he had very troubling dreams about the war. No one really wanted to talk about it, so when I was about six or seven years old, I began to question my great uncle who had been in world war one, and he very systematically described what war was like, talking about trench warfare, so I carried this image about war in my psyche as well, and it sort of became an overlay for the Vietnam experience, and consequently became sort of even more intensified, because my brother had been in Vietnam before I had been in Vietnam, interestingly enough, and he had been in the infantry, and we never really talked about it, and we still haven't really talked about it.
I mention in the poem "Facing It" Andrew Johnson, my best friend, growing up in Louisiana, ended up dying in the Vietnam conflict as well. Um, I was stationed at Fort Benning and I was assigned to the Racial Harmony Council, and edited a publication entitled "Harambee," which means "let's pull together." And the Racial Harmony Council had about a hundred and twenty investigators. I dealt with racial situations within the context of the US military. Um, I sort of saw a contradiction, you know, a very serious contradiction, as a matter of fact, so I began to sort of weigh those things within the context of my psyche as well, those contradictions. Supposedly we'd gone to Vietnam, well, other wars as well, in defense of freedom and the idea of democracy and what have you, so my whole life began to weigh the contradictions. And when I started writing poetry, I had been reading, especially, the French Surrealists, and also, the Negritude poets such as Aime Cesaire and Robert Hayden. And I tried to, not really write about Vietnam, because I didn't really think about Vietnam as subject matter for poetry, so my early poems are layered imagery outside of the Vietnam conflict as such.
In nineteen eighty-four, I was renovating a house in New Orleans. I had been teaching at the University of New Orleans for a few years, and I began to write a poem, "Somewhere Near Phu Bai." And that particular poem sort of released all the other images as such. I had sort of fooled myself. I thought I had forgotten about it, but once I started writing that poem, all the other images came back. So in a sense it was a sort of, you could say, cleansing, of whatever, of memory. Presently, I said I wouldn't write about Vietnam anymore, but I'm writing a book-length poem called "Autobiography of My Alter-Ego." And interestingly enough, it's spoken by a white Vietnamese-a white Vietnam veteran, OK, and what he's doing is he's telling you things that many of us don't want to face. I have a whole history for this individual, a whole personal history, for this individual. When he comes back to the States he rides the Greyhound, the Trailway, cris-crossing the country, and he has witnessed all kinds of things within the context of his family, but also within the context of the larger society, and he bears witness. I knew his father, his, you could say, his individual, who, going to time-in the nineteen-forties, nineteen-fifties, you could say individuals such as Pat Boone, you know, singing the songs about-that sort of time when the juke box-the juke boxes across American were also segregated. The other thing I'm working on is hopefully an experimental novel called "The Long Odyssey." The reason I want to address this is this reason. He was from Senegal. He was-he's like a well-kept secret, I feel because in Senegal he was commander of the fifth Viet Cong regiment, OK, um, African. I want to deal with him for the simple reason that it's as if he's been erasured. Early on, he practiced some psychological warfare-he would hit a unit and leave the black American soldiers alive-that was early on. Psychological warfare. The other thing I wanted to look at, I wanted to understand why there were fourteen or fifteen black Americans who threw themselves on grenades to save members of their units-I wanted to look at that because it hasn't really been addressed. OK.
Beth Taylor: Marilyn McMahon
Marilyn McMahon: Uh, I grew up in Seattle-some of you heard this yesterday, and I'll repeat it very fast this time-I grew up in a working-class Roman Catholic family in the fifties in Seattle. I was born right at the end of World War Two. I was raised on John Wayne movies and well, in particular, Mickey Rooney movies, lots and lots of movies about war, I was also-we were lace-curtain Irish, if that makes sense to any of you-death is a bad thing, pay for things in cash, mom didn't work, she raised the daughters until she was bored to tears. Went to Catholic school, managed to find a grade school that didn't have any tuition-that helped, my dad was the bus driver. Went to a high school that did have a tuition, got a scholarship, and worked during the summers, babysitting. For those of you who have done any, twenty-five cents an hour. That's a lot of babies. Then I went immediately to Seattle University, which is a Jesuit college, in the school of nursing. I was not exposed to much, as I grew up, I'm disappointed that I was exposed to so little, but anyway, finishing high school in nineteen sixty-three, the things that I could look forward to being seemed to be a nun, a mother, a teacher, or a nurse, and so I chose nursing, and I went to Seattle University, and I did really well there. I got good grades, but-and I got a scholarship the fist year-the second year I still had a scholarship but then I got a C in Biology, and I figured if you got a C in Biology you weren't going to get a scholarship for next year so I'd better do something about it. Well, I didn't know they only compared me to the other nursing students, and all the nursing students got a C in Biology, and, but I found a way. What I did was, I and seven other students in my class at Seattle University School of Nursing, joined different military officer candidate programs, and this was a particular nurse corps candidate. They paid for my junior and senior year in college. By virtue of that I was going to be able to graduate from college without any financial debt. For those of you who are setting up the next eighteen years of your life to pay off your school loans, um, this was a big deal. And all I had to do was be in the military for three years, and that seemed really easy. Like anyone at the age of twenty-two, or twenty at that time, three years was nothing. Oh, I'll do that and a cakewalk! See some of the world, you know, go someplace! On somebody else's dime, that kind of stuff.
So I finished school-I had chosen the Navy and so did another young lady from my class, and she chose where she wanted to go, she chose Orlando, or, I mean, not Orlando, but anyway, Texas and Florida and Philadelphia, and I said, Oh my God, I would have chosen anything north-give me Great Lakes, something where it's cold, not hot. But anyway, we ended up in Philadelphia after learning how to be officers down here. I went to Officer Candidate School in October if nineteen sixty-seven, and in November was working on an orthopedics admissions ward in the Philadelphia Naval Hospital. I was there during Tet sixty-eight. I have stories about that to tell. Basically, the outline for the admissions ward for orthopedics was everyone with an orthopedic injury; that is, a fracture or amputation of a bone, arm or a leg or a shoulder or hip bones, those kind of things. Feet, hands, they all came to us first. If they had other things going on they might send them to another ward, but typically most of the orthopedic injuries came to us. By the time of sixty-eight we were hot-bedding them, practically. We had thirty beds, we would fill em up in the morning and have them empty for the afternoon plane. Literally getting up to thirty patients in our one ward, twice a day, which is impossible, by the way. You really-. The advantage of taking care of, particularly draftees, but could have been any-most infantry, most people who got injured were young, and before they got injured they were healthy. And they got over phenomenal injuries, they lived-but unbelievable injuries, and lived in, for some of them, attained a pretty reasonable ability to live. I'm thinking of a man named David who had both of his lower limbs removed, and he had some brain injury as well, and by the time he left us, he was walking on his new-his prostheses-very well, without a limp, which is hard when it's both lower limbs had been replaced. He had a job, he had a girlfriend, he was happy with his life. Now, he may not have ever gone on to the life he would have had if he hadn't went, but he was happy with the life he had then. Some advantage of some head injuries is you don't remember what it was like before.
Well, anyway, so I took care of these guys for two years-I was in Philadelphia when Martin Luther King was killed; I was in Philadelphia when Robert Kennedy was killed; it was hot and humid in Philadelphia. I didn't like it, so I asked for orders to Vietnam. (laughter). Thank you, I hoped you would notice that. So I went to Vietnam, and I served in Da Nang, which was a land-based hospital. The other nurses-there were thirty Navy nurses at the Da Nang Hospital; then there were thirty nurses on each the Sanctuary and the Repose, two hospital shops that traded off short tours off the coast of I Corps which is the top quarter of South Vietnam, which is where most of the Marines were. I worked, um, medical wards first, malaria. When I got there there were bunks beds in the malaria wards. We had censuses of around seventy-two to ninety-five patients per ward, three foremen and one nurse; actually the nurse covered more than one ward. Um, didn't do any nursing. I went there to do better nursing than I was doing in Philadelphia, and I didn't do any nursing to speak of. I did training, and personnel management, and some emergency stuff. But night duty, two hundred seventy-two patients when we didn't have bunk beds, and one nurse-forty of which patients were prisoners of war, and there's plenty of experiences there I haven't yet written about. I was attacked once in the prisoner of war ward by someone who was very ill, but she-it was a woman, a young woman, and she still managed to get some scissors-and I do want to tell you this story-she pulled the scissors on me, and I really wasn't in any danger. It looked like it, because she had scissors in her hand and she was going for my throat, but the reality was she was dreadfully ill, temperature's about one-hundred-six, I could have pushed her over with a brush of my hand. What really happened was, this was reported, she was restrained, and when I came to work the next day she was gone. It took twenty-five years for me to connect the dots, allow myself to connect the dots, and figure out where she went. Among the most protected people in Vietnam were the American women, and attacking me with a pair of scissors was, indeed, committing suicide, which is what-she was removed and killed, and that was a knowledge I had then that I didn't get to know for many, many, many, many years.
I had-when I came home from Vietnam, I did everything I could do to fit right back into the spot I left. I did go around and show slides, but I showed pretty slides. I showed slides of the wards during Christmas when they were decorated. There's a kind of bed called a circle electric bed. When somebody's neck was so shattered that they can't even roll over, you smush them in a - you smush em-like this-and flip em over, now they're laying on their stomach- then you smush em again and flip em over on their back, and you can put them in any level if they need their feet down or their head down or whatever. Well, uh, we would decorate those up like Santa's sleigh; that kind of stuff. I showed those slides. I showed pictures of our quarters, which the Seabees made very nice. I did everything I could to be normal, and I kept becoming less, and less, and less normal, and I tried all sorts of things to hide, and the most dramatic of which was I became an alcoholic, and drank as a drug to keep the memories away. Finally that couldn't work-I couldn't drink enough; my liver wouldn't let me drink enough. So I quit drinking and now I have memories, and this time, instead of trying to stuff them away, I started to talk about them, and over time some of that talking turned into writing.
I have written other genres besides poetry, but everything that really shares what I want to share turns out to be poetry, and even when I think I'm writing prose, it turns out to be poetry. Just quit making it run on, and cut out the deadwood, and it turns out to be poetry. I don't do-I have done most of my poetry reading on the East Coast, for some wonderful reason or another, however, because I'm one of the few women veterans who's actually-name is out there. I have been invited a multitude of times to participate in middle school and high school and junior -level classes around the Vietnam war, and I find that the most important thing I do. I don't need to convince these guys that war is not fun. I don't even, though sometimes you do have to convince some male vets that there are women vets, but I don't really-they're not my message. My message is to the next generations: pay attention. The other thing I'd like to just mention, and then I'll stop-I absolutely agree with Tim. If there is going to be a draft, it needs to be for everybody. There are skills for everybody. There are-if it's going to be a draft, people in wheelchairs should be eligible for the draft. Excuse me, but pushing a button doesn't require jumping over a fence, or carrying a seven hundred pound person. So you'll find that I totally agree with you that. Now I don't honestly think that there should be a draft at all, but if there's going to be one there should be no difference between me and Tim. There actually shouldn't be an age difference either. I'm not volunteering again, I did it, I wouldn't do it again. On the other hand, maybe if we did draft, the Senators and the Congressman would have to go to war. Anyway-
(applause)
Beth Taylor: Laura Palmer
Laura Palmer: Unlike the rest of the members of this panel, I never expected to go to Vietnam, tried to go to Vietnam, wanted to go to Vietnam, or thought there was any way in hell I could possibly end up in Vietnam. I started college in nineteen sixty-eight, so for four years I went to a school very much like Brown - Oberlin College, liberal, elite - and I went to school with boys whose sole purpose in life was never to go to Vietnam. I went to the big protest marches in Washington, was tear gassed, and was passionately opposed to the war. I thought I would-I majored in Government, I thought I would go to law school and get Black Panthers out of jail - something socially relevant. And then, what happened was that the summer between my junior and senior year I was taking my science requirement at Berkeley. I had gone to visit a friend who had dropped out of school and was living off the land. I went up with my sister, and we were hitchhiking back to the Bay Area, and our first ride that day was in a red car with an amputee who had a hook, and he was speeding, and he was shifting, and it was really frightening, and we got out of that car, and we were on the interstate, it was blisteringly hot, and the highway patrol came by and said, "We're going to have to arrest you if we see you here again. You've got to leave: this is illegal." So I looked at my kid sister and I said, "The next car has got to be it." And I looked up the road and I could see, first, something green. As it got closer, I could see it was an old Chevy, and I could see fishing poles, and I thought, "Aha. A hippie car. Maybe they'll stop." Put out my hand. And that was how I got to Vietnam.
I met a pediatrician who was returning to the Bay Area, camping out that night, but was happy to drive us all the way back. I, in effect, hitchhiked to Vietnam. I ended up living with him in San Francisco for a semester, going back to finish college, and the plan was we would do something together when I graduated and he had finished his training. I graduated in May. I was home working as a cocktail waitress, and the phone rang. It was three AM, and he was in Morocco and said, "I have a job offer in Vietnam, do you want to go?" Without a moment's hesitation I said yes. We went for six months; I ended up staying for two years. I had to work in Vietnam because I had paid for the last part of college myself. So there were two choices: you could work for the US Embassy - two choices that, where you could earn a good salary: you could work for the press corps, you could work for the embassy. Well, the Embassy, I figured, was out for me because of my politics, so I started to look for a job in the press corps. I went to every bureau in Saigon, and I would sit down and be asked questions, and I could only answer no to every question. "Do you have any-what did you major in, did you major in journalism?" "No." "Do you have any experience in journalism?" "No." "Do you know anything about the military?" "No." "Do you speak Vietnamese?" "Uh, no." Uh-I was really not qualified, and then I would say, "Are there any openings here?" and they would inevitably say "no."
ABC news was looking for a freelance radio reporter, which was called a stringer. It was-the New York Times was in the middle of a sex discrimination suit, and quite frankly, they were looking for women. Every media organization knew they needed to put women on the air and on their staffs. So I was extraordinarily lucky to get my first job-I remember I didn't know what a radio spot was; I think I spent a week writing my demo tape, and when I got the job, the first day I came into work, the bureau chief sat me down beside him, first words out of his mouth were, "I just want you to know that of all the applicants, you were the least qualified." I was clearly in over my head, but I realized I had a terrific opportunity, and I worked very, very hard to learn what I needed to know. I had gone to Vietnam with answers. I think we saw the war and the anti-war movement in black and white terms-war was wrong, America was wrong. I feel that by the end of my time in Vietnam I was proud to say that I understood the questions, and I had come away with a sense of the many, many shades of grey. I wrote my first magazine piece in Vietnam; a piece for Rolling Stone, worked in radio for two years and was a stringer for Time magazine.
I - throughout my life I have left Vietnam but it has never left me, but each time I leave, I say, "well, this is it." I left in sixty-nine, the day after Nixon resigned. I was in Paris, Vietnam started to come undone about nine months later, and I couldn't bear not to be there. I ended up, because I made enough money reporting the death of Aristotle Onassis, who happened to die in Paris on the weekend I was working, I had enough money to buy my last student standby ticket Saigon-Paris for six hundred dollars. And I went back and spent the last month in Vietnam, ending up-I was writing as a stringer for Time again, and Hunter Thompson came to Vietnam, and we worked together because I had some experience with Rolling Stone. And then he decided to go to Hong Kong for a few days to get his head together, or buy a typewriter or do something. And he said to me, as he was leaving the Continental Palace, he said, "If anything happens, it's your story." That was a Saturday, and because I probably had, if I was lucky, one hundred dollars to my name then, I thought, "I'd better cable San Francisco and see if they'll get me out of wherever I end up if something happens." I sent a Telex, which is such an old word, Telex, a Telex to San Francisco: where, if there's an evacuation, where should I go, will you get me out of wherever I end up? And on Monday the answer came back, yes, if there's an evacuation, go. And on Tuesday we were gone. Tuesday morning. I wrote a piece about the US evacuation of Saigon, and got to Manila and called my mother collect from the Manila Hilton. And she said to me, I'll never forget these words, she said, "Honey," she said, "I was watching people go over the Embassy wall, and I thought, you couldn't make it up the apple tree." She said "I had no idea how you would ever get out of there." And there were times, neither did I. But I made it back, and then Vietnam dropped off-truly dropped off the radar screen. I think there was a moment when I went home, which is Evanston, Illinois, a very ordinary suburban community, and I went into the drug store where I had grown up, and someone at the drugstore said, "Laura! Oh, so good to see you, it's been a long time, where have you been?" And I said, "I was in Vietnam for two years and for the last nine months I've been living in Paris," "Paris! Tell me about Paris! Oh, that must have been so exciting," and that was really where the country was then.
I went on and worked in television. I never expected to write anything about Vietnam, although I had, as a child, always dreamed of writing a book. I grew up, you know, reading books in the library, and dreamed of maybe doing that one day, but I had no idea how, and "Shrapnel in the Heart" fell on me. I went to the wall for the first time on New Years Day of nineteen eighty-six. I had lived in L.A. when it was built, I was married and had a child, and my husband, because it was New Years Day, was going to stay home and watch football and baby-sit. So I had a whole day by myself to go down to Washington and see the wall. And the power of the wall, the first experience with me, was not for someone who had been in Vietnam, but as a mother. I think when you've named one child of your own that you cannot look at the names of fifty-eight thousand without feeling an enormity of sadness that's beyond words. That day I learned in chatting with the park ranger that everything that was left at the wall was saved, and I knew, the way you know, something clicked inside, I thought, I've got to see that material. I had a magazine piece a few months later - it was an assignment to come back, and I got to spend three days reading everything that had been left at the wall. And I think all of the good work I've done, my work that has meant the most to me, begins the way Robert Frost describes a poem beginning. He says it begins with either a scream or a lump in the throat, and that day in the warehouse, as I was reading those letters, I felt as though I was hearing a scream in the night. I thought, how can there be this much pain from that war, and I've never heard it-who are these people?
And I had to go and find out. And that was really the beginning of the book which I began in July of eighty-six. I finished it in six months. I don't know how I did it that fast, but I knew I had no choice: the book was going to be published on Veterans Day. I didn't think there was time to use a computer, to learn how to use a computer, which I didn't have, so I did it with a typewriter and white out, and that was really, um, how I got started writing. And I then wrote a newspaper column for two years, which I never planned to do, but I was struck by the grassroots effort of people to try to come to terms with the war. The war had gone on for so long that there was a whole generation of people who were trying to make sense of their lives, and I thought it would be interesting to report that. I went on to do two more books after that, non-fiction books, both collaborations, and it's-and then I gravitated back to television in between books. When the letter came from Beth asking, giving suggestions for what we should speak about tonight, I'd never thought about any of the things on the list. I'd never thought about my voice, I've never thought about genre; I just don't think that way. For me-for Tim, it's sentences, for me, it's always the story. I try to serve the work-to serve the work-there comes a point when you're working on something, and it really takes off, at least for me, that I feel that I'm serving the work. It's not about me or my ego that I feel I got the tap on the shoulder and this is what I'm meant to do, it's the only thing I can do. When you sit down to write a book and you face the blank screen, there's a loneliness there, but there's also an intimacy. You don't think about, is it ever going to be taught, you don't think about, you just-if you think about anything, it's can you finish it before you spend the advance? Um, and I think in the end my work, although it takes a lot out, it gives far more back, and the feeling I'm left with ultimately is one of gratitude and deep humility. Thanks.
(applause)
Beth Taylor: Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh.
Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh: Wow. I'm the last one, huh? (laughs) I am Vietnamese. When I say to you that I am Vietnamese, I mean that I am a South, Southerner, I am a South Vietnamese, because there are a lot of misperceptions about Vietnam. We have the north, we have the central, and we have the south, and during the war there are three sides, or three groups at war involved in Vietnam: the American, and then the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and Republic of Vietnam. So there are three parts. And I grew up in a small village on the Mekong Delta, in-when the two branches of Mekong-um, the war is not really affected to my village or the way that we live for a long time until nineteen sixty-eight. And when I was, when Tet offensive nineteen sixty-eight, occurred in my village, I was twelve years old. And, um, after I finished high school-I try to skip a little, I don't want to drag on too long-um, and after I finish high school in a small town, about one hundred thirty-five kilometers on South Saigon, and I went to Saigon University, about six months or something, in nineteen seventy-four, and then the North took over the South, and Saigon fell to the Communists on April thirtieth, nineteen seventy-five. I was seventeen years and a half. And at that time, when the Hanoi government took over the South, they immediately pulled the bamboo curtain down, and they began to implement the merciless policy against the southerners. So they built up reeducation camps and a labor camps everywhere in the south, and they threw intellectual soldiers, security, police, anybody who relate to the Southern government, into these places to brainwash them, to torture them, to force their labor or whatsoever.
So I spent about eighteen months in the labor camp, and every day they give you one bowl of rice, and this bowl of rice not only rice, but there sand and pebble. And you eat that one bowl of rice and you work from five o'clock in the morning up to seven o' clock at night. And after seven o' clock at night, these guard, the northerner guard, they gonna lecture you about, uh, Ho Chi Minh and about the Communist Party, and how wonderful they are, and all kind of thing like that. And after that you're going to write your confession. So I stay through the course in that labor camp for eighteen months, and I almost-everybody is almost starving to death, in the camp. They can beat you up any time they want, this is how they torture you: they going to tie you up, this thumb to-on your back, to your toe, and another one is on another side, just like this. That's how they tie you up. One thumb to another toe, and another one to another toe, like that. That's how they tie you up, and they leave you in the camp like that for a few hours, so the mosquito come and eat your blood away. That's how they, you know, enjoy the new system that they implanted in the South.
So I couldn't survive for any longer, so I tried to find way to escape. So after that I, eventually I find a way to escape out of the labor camp. And then I couldn't go back to my family, because they'd already seized my family, kicked my family out of the city, and they went back to the village, and all kind of things like that. So I hang around with my friend, and I become a fugitive, and then I use fake papers to go around and stuff like that, and I try to find a way to escape out of the country. So a year later I end up in Thailand. Before I came to a refugee camp in Thailand, I encounter with pirate. And the pirates raped these Vietnamese women in my boat, and so I end up in the refugee camp for one year in nineteen seventy-eight, in Thailand, Leam Singh Refugee Camp, it's near the Cambodian border, and after that I end up in Mississippi, Corinth, Mississippi.
I had a brother who was a pilot for the South Vietnamese government, so he escape out of Vietnam during the chaos of nineteen seventy-five, and my family thought he was dead. But actually he end up in Corinth, Mississippi, so that's the place where I came to be united with them. So I stay in Corinth, Mississippi, like 6 months, and he-there's no jobs there. There's not much going on. It's really-you know Mississippi, a town like two thousand five hundred peoples in that little town, or something. So I end up in California, and I spend like six years working on the, like, you know, sweatshop jobs from McDonalds to factory to whatever, you name it. You talk about clean up the toilets, you talk about sweeping, you know, the street, whatever, I been through that. So I try to save some money and send home underground to my parents in Vietnam. And then after that my two younger brothers and a nephew escape, so they came to San Jose CA and I say to myself, I say, "If my life I cannot do anything for my life, I think I have the responsibility that I have to raise my younger brothers and a nephew the way that my parents brought me up. So I quit my job and I took about five hundred dollars from my savings, and I put a sleeping bag and dried food into the trunk of my Pontiac Firebird nineteen sixty-seven, and we pack up and then I go across the country. So when I go across the country from this state to another state, and when I came to Bennington, Vermont, my car broke down, and I have no money to go anywhere - the only other place I can end up is in the Atlantic Ocean. So I say, "Hey, it's a nice little town, why not just settle?"
So, you know, I took my brothers and nephew to high school to sign up for their English class, and I try to look for a job there, so I met the counselor at high school, Joan Costin, and she kind of help out-help us out. And a year later, I end up at Bennington College, so-on a full scholarship. So at Bennington College I studied with Joe McGinnis, and novelist Arturo Vivante and Ted Hoagland and these really well-known writers. And I never thought that I'm going to write or know anything about writing, I thought. So when I signed up for Joe McGinnis' class and he asked me to submit some of my writing sample or something in order for him to decide whether I could join his class or not-he not going to take anybody; he take about five students for his class or something. So he let me in after that, and after about two workshops from his class or something he called me to his office, and he put my paper out in front of me, and he said, "This is your life, Jade." And I said, "What the heck are you talking about, my life?" And he said, "Your writing is your life." And I said, "English not my language, you kidding? I mean, my English is terrible!" And he said, "I don't care how you do it, but this is your life!"
And, uh, you know, my English was really shaky, I mean, even now, I cannot speak English perfectly, the way that people expect me to, just like when I end up-when I drove across the country I stopped at the Burger King in Iowa, and I order-I came to the counter and ordered the burger, you know, these Whopper and these apple pie, and french fries, for myself and my brother and the nephew. And then, you know, the young lady at the counter, she didn't give me the fork to eat with the apple pie, so I came back to the counter and I said, "May I have a fahk ?" And she looked at me like that. And I don't know what the heck, you know, and I said, "Fahk, may I have a fahk," I thought she not understand or not hearing me well or something, so I repeat that, and everybody, you know, stop what they do and they smile and they laugh, and then I say it again, I say, "May I have a fahk," and then she say, "I'm sorry, I'm busy," so that's how my English, you see? How much my English is good, so I end up at Bennington College, and then after I graduate, after three year and a half, I finish, um, my dissertation at Bennington College in which I work on my first, on my memoir, South Wind Changing, like half of the book there with Joe McGinnis. And then I went, I came to Brown to study with Meredith Steinbach and Edmund White and these wonderful people here. And I work with Meredith on the last part of my memoir. And after I finish it, then Joe McGinnis introduce me to his agent, Janklow & Nesbit, in New York. So I got the book contract with Graywolf Press. So it came out in nineteen ninety-four, and after I graduate from Brown University, I found a job, teaching job at Appalachian State University, so I've been teaching there since ninety-five until now. I teach creative nonfiction and fiction there, and I am on the National Endowment for the Arts right now, to work on my two books entitled "My Daughter," and my second one is "The Family Wound", so I hope to get it done sometime next year, and hopefully going to be out next year. And, you know, the more you write, the harder it gonna get.
So if you want to write, don't think about, if you have a first book out, then the second book is easier-no, it go the opposite way: the harder it gonna get. So, um, that how I end up in America, and how I became a writer, and how the boat people influence my way of life. Because, you know, after the Hanoi took over Vietnam, there are so many Vietnamese, Southern Vietnamese, have been forced out of their homes, to escape out of the country, so they can survive. And I'm still on the boat, although I've been living here for twenty-one years, and I haven't been back home for twenty-nine years, already, and I hope someday I may return to Vietnam and see my parents and my older brothers-I have seventeen brother and sister, one father and one mother. Yep. So that's, that is how I end up with my writing, and I, you know, learn how to speak English and I learn how to write. Everyday, practice, practice make perfect, So I never satisfied with whatever I write. I write something, whether it's a second draft, or a fifth draft, or tenth draft or something. I always go back and I say, "Hey, this is a piece of shit." You know, it's just like a piece of iceberg: just look at a piece of iceberg how it float on the water. There's only one third of a piece of iceberg float on the top of the water. Two third of that piece of iceberg sink under the water. So in order for you to have that one third of that, that's how you write, you write a hundred pages, maybe you can use five or ten pages, actually, so I think it's - I'm going to leave it up to you for questions and stuff like that, before getting too long. Thank you.
(applause)
Beth Taylor: We're going to skip the chance for these folks to talk to each other, because they can talk in Gardner House later tonight, and we would like to take questions from the floor, so anyone ask any question of any of these writers, or all of them-
Frank Grzyb: This question is for Philip Capu-Caputo. Philip, I've read your book twice, and absolutely fantastic book, and I think that thousands of other people agree. Uh, my question is not really about Vietnam, it may be indirectly about Vietnam-I was kind of taken aback when I was standing next to you in the back of the room, because after reading your book I got this impression of this kind of wild officer in Vietnam, a very fairly aggressive, et cetera, et cetera, and today you seem to be very mellow, and I don't know if I misread your character and your personality, or-did I read you correctly, have you changed since, uh, writing, or-
Philip Caputo: I smoked a joint before I came.
(laughter)
Frank Grzyb: That's what I thought!
Philip Caputo: I don't know, I, just, not that-
Male audience member one: I just want to say the last time I was here I had a big fight with MacNamara, the quiz kid, he couldn't even sell a Ford, and he was running the war in Vietnam. Uh, you've read his - my heart goes out to you writers because I've been trying to write a book for years. I would sit in my room and write and write and write, and the whole thing would be on the floor, and my wife would walk in, she says, "Are you building a fire?" Really. So this is the first time anyone's going to hear what I'm going to say. I was with the highest ranking Marine officer that got killed in Vietnam, and he didn't get killed-well, he got killed, but it was assassination. I know what I'm talking about, I've never told anybody, but I'm trying to use this as a healing. I flew out to California last year, went to the grave, done everything. I'm still suffering. I just can't write a book, so I took this opportunity to come here. Now, the nineteen-I read the book about General Westmoreland who had the Soldier's-something or other-and in there, he was surprised about the Tet Offensive. Here's a four-star general, surprised about the Tet Offensive. I knew-I was a staff sergeant in the marine Corps-I knew about the Tet Offensive in October of nineteen sixty-seven. I was in the office with General Hocking when he was on the telephone, talking to Da Nang, begging for more Marines! I knew we were in a terrible position in nineteen sixty-seven. Now, I've read a lot of books, but no one seems to write about General Hocking. Maybe they didn't have the information, but I'm here today just to tell you that he was on the phone talking to General Cushman-he was in charge of Da Nang-and we tried to get more Marines in 1967, and we didn't get them because General Westmoreland refused, and the idea was that if we sent more Marines to Vietnam in nineteen sixty-seven, that the American people would be terribly upset, so we didn't get the men.. And then, later on, and anything I say, I will take a lie detector test, I'm not fabricating a thing here-
Beth Taylor: Thank you-
Philip Caputo: Let me interrupt here a second-
Male audience member one: Yeah, sure-
Philip Caputo: OK, um, I think there's-it sounds like this is going to go on for quite a while, so there's a lot of questions-
Male audience member one: I'll stop, I'll stop, sure.
Philip Caputo: Talk about it outside.
Beth Taylor: Maybe we can, um, thank you for your story and it would have been great to be at the vets' workshop yesterday; that was a time when we-I have a list, I want you to put your name on it, it's a new veteran's writing workshop in Rhode Island and the larger area, so see me please, right after the-thank you. But getting back to Frank's question, here, Phil, I think he is actually asking a legitimate question, that, um, presentation of self, persona.
Philip Caputo: I can't answer it, I'm sorry. I'm 57 years old now, and if you ain't mellowed out by 57, you're really in trouble. I reckon that's gotta be what it is.
Frank Grzyb: Good thank you. Yeah.
Female audience member one: Hi, I enjoyed all your talks this evening, and I'm sorry I missed your poetry this afternoon, you poets, but I have a question for Yusef, I couldn't understand your final sentence when you were speaking this evening, and it's been on my mind now, ever since-what were you saying about the story that had to be told about fifteen black soldiers that, what, went over a bridge for their regiment?
Yusef Komunyakaa Well, um, I said something about a well-kept secret, you know, that, um, fourteen or fifteen black Americans threw themselves on grenades and consequently they were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. I was-I've been very curious about what prompts that kind of action, just from a psychological point of view.
Female audience member one: Thank you, Marilyn, for your sharing of your story of the woman who had vanished the next day. I've worked in hospitals myself, and it's always a shock to have somebody vanish the next day who you think will be there the following day-it must have been very heavy on your mind afterwards to realize that you might have been directly responsible for her being missing, and your compassion for her, thank you for sharing that.
Ed Arellano: I'm a teacher of writing, and I have sort of an open question, uh, I have a lot of students who, um, think about, uh, war when thinking about what they're writing, and, um, I'm thinking for a young student who, of course, has never experienced combat; has never been in a wartime situation, do you have any advice? What are some of the possible pitfalls for someone who wants to write fiction, who wants to write about Vietnam from the imagination-I'm curious if anyone has advice for that, with regard to some writers who haven't experienced what you've experienced first-hand.
Laura Palmer: Well, I'll say one thing off the top of my head. I think that you should really listen and see what's inside that's asking to be written. I think that it's much easier to follow your heart and to listen and to pay attention and it will present itself to you. I think that you don't have to think that to be a real writer, I have to go to war and write about that in your own life. I assure you, uh, there's enough there to write about if you do the work, you pay attention, and you stick with it. I think one of the things that impresses me time after time after time again as a writer is how much bad writing it takes to get to the good. I think if Beth had asked each of us to bring a first draft tonight, something we had written, she would have rescinded the invitations, It's absolutely staggering how hard it is, and when you actually finish something, you go back and look at it, and think, "Oh, my God." So, never feel yourself inadequate, just start, and it may not feel like much at the time, but in the end, it's always scales. You know, no one sits down and plays a concerto. You just have to have faith in the scales, and if you keep playing the scales, one day the real music will begin.
Philip Caputo To just add a little comment to that, um, do you, do you teach your students The Red Badge of Courage at all?
Ed Arellano: I don't, yet.
Philip Caputo: Well, I'm-you know, Stephen Crane was born five years after the Civil War; wrote the greatest novel about the Civil War, and it's all pulled out of the imagination. The imagination is; can be a great sextant when you're, when you're looking for truth rather than just researching facts. So I would certainly emphasize-have them read that novel and see what can become just with somewhat-through the power of the imagination.
Beth Taylor: Thank you both.
Male audience member three: I think this is primarily for Phil and Tim, but I certainly welcome comments by the others. Last night Tim talked quite a bit about truth in fiction, and that sort of raises the question of where is the demarcation line in memoir, and the extent to which someone can-- I hate to use the word embellish, or minimize, in either direction. But what brings me to it is just some discussions that we were having earlier, and also my recollection of what Paul Fussell had to say about Robert Gray's "Goodbye to all That," which most people take as the Gospel. But Fussell has very nicely dissected his considerably, if not made up, embellished, so that, you know, we have the truth in fiction. And what do we have in nonfiction and memoir, where's the line, how do you use it?
Philip Caputo: Well, I was somewhat, it was a pillory in the New York Times-I suppose if you're going to get pilloried, you might as well get pilloried there, right? Um, and by--. For, when I wrote a memoir called "Means of Escape," which was actually sort of a sequel to "A Rumor of War," but it was more about my journalistic career. But I mingled fiction with nonfiction into this, and that was regarded as, although I made very distinct which was fiction and which wasn't, that was regarded as something of a sin. My thought of this is this, that in particular a book like "A Rumor of War," is obviously, a lot of the dialogue in there is reconstructed dialogue out of memory. If I were to say, "Yes, this guy said that, at that very moment, those words, it's ridiculous - of course he didn't. Just the sheerest selection of detail, what you remember, but also what you give away when you want to remember is important in memoir. A good friend of mine who teaches journalism up at UMASS of Amherst, has a good phrase about memoir; she says "a memoir is the tale that memory tells." It's not a documentary, it's not a piece of factual reportage, necessarily. But that doesn't mean it isn't true, just as a work of pure fiction can be truer, I think as Tim said earlier today, than that which is, than that which is factually true. There are emotional truths to be gotten across about the way we feel and the way we see things, that quite often require a certain amount of fictionalizing of the facts. I'll try to make this real brief, but "Means of Escape" starts off with an episode of a platoon that is wiped out in an ambush. And only one person survives this ambush and he eventually goes insane. Now it's based-that story I did in there is actually, in effect, kind of a fictional sketch. It's not a full-blown short story, but it's fictionalized off a real incident, something that actually happened to somebody I know, and I wanted to get across a certain kind of visual and emotional truth to that experience. I had never experienced it - obviously, I'm still walking around. And in order to do it, I had to fictionalize, but I think I got across a certain kind of truth about that experience. So I-I don't, there is a line, but I don't think it's quite as definite as the yellow line on the highway.
Rich Lee: I have a question for all the writers-Tim had talked about this a little bit last night, and actually, I spoke to Marilyn a little bit about this-as traumatic events go that can serve as, I guess, a motivation, but also a strong deterrent to writing, um, I guess Vietnam would definitely be one of them, and I was wondering about the process with which you bridge this gap. Certainly-- I spoke with Marilyn, and she was going to write her thesis on anthropological, something about Vietnam veterans, and it was hard because at that moment in her life, it was very hard to deal with that. At a certain point, I just need to express it that way, through writing. So I was just wondering about these processes for all of you.
Yusef Komunyakaa: For me, um, it wasn't a thought-out process. It was just something that happened. What usually happens when I'm doing physical work-I was renovating a house in New Orleans, and the whole thing with going up and down the fourteen foot ladders and what have you, um, I usually have a pad of paper close by. I begin writing a poem. I write part of the poems inside my head before I even think about committing them to life, to paper, as such. So I began writing a poem inside my head, entitled "Somewhere Near Phu Bai." And it wasn't a thought-out process, I just found myself writing about it.
Beth Taylor: Anybody else have a response to that, the process you go through in writing, sometimes?
Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh: Um, for me, um, I never thought about writing at all. But I had so many stories that I knew of, and many of these story that I can relate to my uncle, my aunt, or my, any of my relatives. And these story keep bugging me. It's just like some kind of fire inside me or something. It keeps burning and burning, and I keep thinking about this story and thinking about this story, and then couldn't sleep for a few days, a week, few days. And then-boom-I got to sit down and put it down. In a way, I use my writing just like therapy. I take, take putting on paper-I don't care about grammar, I don't care about the language I use or whatsoever, just use it, just like psychology, you know, jot down, you know, how, lines, story or something like that. So after I work and I put the story down, I write day and night. People, you know, you have to find your own way how to express yourself. Some people, they are really good in the morning. Some people, they wake up in the morning, for them, like Joe McGinnis, wake up really early in the morning. He have a cup of coffee and he write until eleven o'clock and he stop and he go and do something else, and then he come back and do it again next day. For me, I write day and night until I am exhausted. And then I, you know, go out, sleep or something. And then I, you know, take a shower, and then I go out, do something or something. I don't even look back what I wrote there, and I just leave it there for a week or two weeks or something, and I keep going on with the story. And I can see, you know, all these scenes that are happening in my head. And I think, you know, put it out just like the water flow now. And, you know, later on when I come back and I look at it and I try to structure it later and stuff.
Rich Lee: Would you say it's mostly a therapeutic effect? I'm asking all of the writers. I know that Tim O'Brien, you said, last night, you just write, it wasn't necessarily as a healing process, a response to the war. I'm wondering how much, how many, to what degree it is for any of you, and what it would be if it wasn't that.
Marilyn McMahon: I think that the first writing that I did was, indeed, somewhat healing, and the biggest reason that it was healing is that when I shared my writing, which is my feelings, with other people, they had feelings, too. In other words, it was breaking down the isolation by my writing, and not be dumping my memories on these, so now I don't have to have them anymore. But just-the dramatic piece of it is becoming, re-becoming part of the human race. Now, I have feelings when I read my poetry. I get wonderful reactions when-I mean, I feel very touched when you like my poetry or you have reactions to my poetry, and I - again I still, I still get positive effects if you have-you can't tell me too many times that I'm part of the human race, I could keep hearing this over and over again, it's fine with me. You know? And so that was what it was for me most. The piece of, breaking down the wall. Melting the wall, really.
Beth Taylor: Any other response to that?
Tim O'Brien: I mean, all I said last night, I'll repeat it now, is that, I don't think that good art comes out of a therapeutic motive. I think that good art can do therapeutic things to you, um, can carry catharsis, if you can do it. But I think that someone trying to make a good book, good poems, good story, play, whatever, has to look at it as almost a sculptor molding a piece of clay - something distant, shaping it, and not just spewing out emotion after emotion after emotion after emotion after emotion like a laundry list, which is a lot of the bad writing that comes out of any field, Vietnam included. But there are tons of fields, where, you know, every made-for-TV movie is incredibly boring, as its topicality sort of compels you to say, kind of, nod at it. "Oh yeah. Abusing wives is bad. Abusing wives is bad." There's nothing new about it! I mean, the story isn't new, there's no unique twist on it, the language isn't interesting, and the sort of mockish fake sentimentality that accompanies any area like a Vietnam, um, bugs me, it bothers me, and there's enough garbage in this world that I don't think veterans and writers of the war, we should be contributing more to what already is, you know, the sewage that fills New York Harbor, that walks out of the, treated as objects. Try to make good ones. We make nice sentences and so on, and not just to do therapy in public. That's what I was kind of reacting to last night.
Beth Taylor: Thanks. Do you have a question right here?
Female student in audience one: Yeah-can I ask two questions?
Beth Taylor: Well, let's start with one.
Female student in audience one: OK-This question is for Tim O'Brien-when I read your book, "The Things They Carried," I was wondering about how you had decided on the narrative structure, because I guess that, the stories weren't exactly temporally linked in any sort of temporal order, but there did seem to be a flow between them, and I was just interested in how you came to creating that narrative structure?
Tim O'Brien: My ears are plugged, I have a bad cold-
Beth Taylor: How did you organize "The Things They Carried?" How did you choose what to put where?
Tim O'Brien: Well, what Yusef says is pretty much what happens to me when I organize a book, put it together. First a kind of scrap of language comes to me, a phrase-and in the case of "The Things They Carried," it was pretty much the title of the book: the things that, you know, they carried. It was a bit of language. I liked the sound of it. It didn't even have to be a Vietnam book. It could have been the things you carry around at Brown University, you know, wherever. Um, and you begin playing with the language, thinking first of course about the physical things we carried in Vietnam-that, of course, occurred to me. I went beyond that to the spiritual burdens that we carried through the war and out of it, through the rest of our lives, and begins not just with conceptual things, begins with the words you use. I was in England about a week ago, and it occurred to me somewhere in this weird, long plane flight going over there that there are twenty-six letters in our alphabet, English, and out of those twenty-six letters come "Ulysses," but also everything in Cosmopolitan, and every magazine ever written. It's like a genetic code, it's incredible, and those twenty-six letters and maybe add commas and exclamation points and so on, are what all of us have-we have nothing else but those twenty-six letters and we're writing in English, and to pay attention to the language is our first obligation as writers. Otherwise we can't get through to you. You see what I'm saying? No matter how grand our concept, how great our pain, nonetheless, what we rely on is this language the same way, say, a filmmaker might rely on celluloid and image or so on, and a painter on his easel with, you know, paints and so on. We've got those twenty-six letters and nothing else, and when we ask the question how books are formed and how they link together, that comes a bit later, what comes first is just a little sound of language. First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, you sort of pause, carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. And I actually scan the writing, like, what sound. I mean, I don't write poetry. I do the same thing a poet does. I mean, each syllable matters to me, and the bounce of the language, that will carry you through it. And no matter how wonderful the story is, if the language doesn't bound with an elasticity and beauty, it won't move. You know, it'll come across sounding like a Starsky and Hutch episode. And no matter how global the concept, and the sorts of language I think all of us have as our fundamental building blocks, um, and it's there in books and stories, and I think it all really begins in the tongue, which right now for me is kind of inarticulate, I'm so sick of my own voice here-
Beth Taylor: You're doing fine, you're doing fine; thank you. Let's ask another question, as we are getting hot.
Female audience member two: Who are your favorite authors? Who do you look up to as writers?
Beth Taylor: Who do you like to read?
Marilyn McMahon: I'll answer that first because I've answered it several times today and it hasn't changed-Adrienne Rich and Bill Erhardt are my two, um-
Beth Taylor: Bill Erhardt is a wonderful Vietnam soldier-poet.
Yusef Komunyakaa: I suppose I keep coming back to Robert Hayden He's rather instructive for me, and also Aime Cesaire.
Beth Taylor: Anybody else have a favorite writer?
Laura Palmer: Uh, I'd say Virginia Woolf was very high on the list for me, and the book that just won the Pulitzer Prize, which I stumbled on a week or so ago, called The Hours.
Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh: Leo Tolstoy is my favorite. I'm going crazy for these Russian novels. Ivan Turgenev , and you know, these writers, because their way of expressing themselves, really, familiar with the Vietnamese style, way of telling the story-really descriptive, uh, paragraph. And it's really about, you know, Asia, just like when you read Japanese poetry. It's-the images in these poem, or the way they express really go to nature. That's why, you know, Lao Szu mention in his writing, he say that you have to live in harmony with nature, so their kind of writing is-I can relate to-
Beth Taylor: Thank you.
Male audience member three: Uh, I'm Vietnam veteran sixty-seven-sixty-eight America. I'd like to know, knowing what you know now, what kind of dialogue would you write to a son, eighteen years old, going off to Vietnam? And-
Tim O'Brien: Going off to Vietnam?
Male audience member three: Going off to a Vietnam.
Tim O'Brien: Oh, a Vietnam.
Male audience member three: Knowing what you know-Tim, I think I know what you would write, Laura, I think I know what you would write-
Laura Palmer: Tell me, because I don't know-
Male audience member three: Well, you've been to the wall, you've been to the memorial, I think you know the pain and everything that's there; Tim, fictionalizing it, I'm not sure, I just don't know if you could, but just briefly-if you had a son that you were sending off to a Vietnam, what is the dialogue you would write between him and yourself, knowing your-
Philip Caputo: What would I tell him?
Male audience member three: What would you tell him. Yes, knowing your experience-
Philip Caputo: Keep your head and ass down, and listen to your ??
Tim O'Brien: You mean advice you'd be giving him?
Male audience member three: Yes, if-very similar to the non-advice you received-
Tim O'Brien: Oh, I see what you mean-
Male audience member three: Coming from your father sitting in the kitchen.
Tim O'Brien: I'd probably tell him a story-you know, true-about My Lai, and that day, and how it was kind of a watershed for me personally. Uh-you know, what a shocker it was to think of our country as this, you know, beautiful nation full of rectitude, and viewing itself as the white knight of international politics for so many years, and suddenly a story breaks, so shocking for all of us, although the apex of that horror, this day in March in sixty-eight, you know, those guys flew into this village and over the next four hours systematically killed five-hundred-two babies and teenagers and old men and women-knifed them, scalped them, hand grenaded them, machine-gunned them, shot them with pistols, shot them with M-60s, shot them with M-16s, dumped them in wells, raped them, for four hours, and I'd say-My Lai-there's an evil part of all of us, not just Americans, but all of us, and if you really want to look at that part of yourself that closely, and maybe, you know, Canada's five hours away, I'll give you my car, go think it over for a while before you go.
Beth Taylor: Thank you. Another question?
Female audience member three: I'd just like to know if any of your spouses, significant others, have written about their life with you since you have been back from Vietnam, and/or, if any of your children have begun to write.
Laura Palmer: Well, I was married when I wrote "Shrapnel in the Heart," and, um, my husband and I never had one conversation about the book while I was writing the book, so maybe that answers it for you. And I do have a daughter, and I don't think she would write about Vietnam, simply because it hasn't-she's familiar with it, interested in it, studied it in school, but it isn't something that would be a passion for her. Uh, why didn't my husband and I talk about it? Because at that time, it was a very unhappy period in our lives, and because it meant too much to me to let anyone wreck it. And, um, I never show anything I'm writing to anyone until it's at a certain point where I feel I'm satisfied, because once you, once I hit a certain level of satisfaction, I know, if I know it may need to be edited and changed, but if it's as good as I can do at this point, then I feel safe in showing it to someone else. But early in the process, negative reactions or "So, what's the big deal?" it will just shatter me, so I don't. It's too intimate, you know, you have to protect it-I find. It may be different for the rest of them, but-
Beth Taylor: Jackie, who asked the question, is a wife of a vet, and has written wonderful poetry based on that experience, so I think that's part of where her question is coming from, for any of you-
Philip Caputo: Well, I've been married three times and none of my spouses have written anything about me. Um, no, they haven't said-and I do have, one of my sons is a newspaper reporter, and actually quite a good writer, and recently a war correspondent, in fact-just got back form Iraq, uh, from the overflights over there or whatever we're doing. And, uh, he's a quite good writer, but he hasn't addressed himself to any of that that I know of. I was told that when he was in school he wrote some things about me that the teacher refused to show me. I can't imagine what they were-he said they somehow related or something in some way to the Vietnam experience, but this particular English teacher wouldn't show it to me; I don't know if it was because it was unflattering or something-
Beth Taylor: Thank you. This will be our last question.
Female student two: I was wondering what the writers on the panel, um, feel about certain films about Vietnam-like Apocalypse Now, Forrest Gump, Platoon?
Yusef Komunyakaa: I realize that I've only seen one of those films, um, "Apocalypse Now." Um, I've-I do feel that the previews I've seen that pretty much-serve as a way of creating artificial heroes. So-it's just my point of view.
Laura Palmer: I hated "Forrest Gump." The movie, for me, because, I think it, well, I know because it came just after I finished writing "Shrapnel in the Heart," was "Platoon," I hadn't thought about the relationship between the movie and the book. I finished the book, the movie came out, I thought, "Wow, I'm going to go and see that, and I'll just see it by myself at, you know, twelve o'clock in the afternoon," whatever it was. And I went and sat in the front of the theatre, and suddenly the movie began, and there was dust and there was choppers and suddenly there were all my boys, and it-for me, it was the moment when I, I really cried about Vietnam.
Beth Taylor Another response?
Marilyn McMahon: I have one. I've only seen a couple of them. I actually enjoyed "Forrest Gump" for the music, but the one-I'm going to answer this elliptically or metaphorically or whatever-I get the right, I'm a poet, and that is that I have a nephew whose now about twenty-four, but at the time he was in junior high, and he saw "The Right Stuff" four times. And I took him up in a room, and I said, "I know your mother doesn't want you to watch this shit, but you've got to promise me that before you go to any recruiting station, you will watch 'Platoon.'" Uh, he did not go to the recruiting station.
Beth Taylor: One final response, any-
Laura Palmer: Yes, just about movies-"The Deer Hunter" was really the film that helped create the Vietnam Veterans Memorial-Jan Scruggs had been to see it, and he came home and he was sitting in the kitchen, and he was sitting alone, and he was drinking a bottle of scotch, and he started having flashbacks. And it was at that moment when he said, "I'm going to build-there's going to be a memorial in Washington that's gonna have everybody's name on it." He told his wife the next morning, and thank God she didn't say, "That's too stupid, that's never going to happen." I think part of it-you know, Jan was so naïve. If any of the rest of us had that idea, we might say, "It'll never happen" and we'd go on, uh, to something else, but fortunately he didn't, and a lot of that had to do with the Deer Hunter.
Beth Taylor: And on that note, we should retire to the lobby and see the photographs of the Wall.
(applause)